Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SENSORBEES (Sensorbees are ENhanced Self-ORganizing Bio-hybrids for Ecological and Environmental Surveillance)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-09-01 bis 2025-08-31
With over 75% of biomass and biodiversity loss over the last 30 years, Earth's ecosystems are on the brink of collapse. This catastrophe is now in the scientific community called the sixth mass extinction. This decline is fueled by anthropogenic stressors like climate change, pollution, and land overexploitation and seriously threatens human civilisation, which depends on healthy ecosystems. To better understand and address biodiversity decline, we need to observe what is actually happening inside ecosystems. By teaming robots with keystone species like honeybees, we can turn their natural activities into a valuable ecosystem information source. By interacting with the bees inside their habitat, our robots will extract information collected by the foraging bees from the surrounding environment. By interconnecting these cyber-enhanced hives, we will create a scalable, self-sustainable, wide-coverage and high-resolution sensor network continuously surveying the ecosystem diversity. Our sensing system integrates micro-robots within honeybee colonies, not to replace the bees, but to complement and better understand their vital pollination service.
We have designed and manufactured two robotic devices capable of retrieving information from living honeybee hives. These robots are now able to provide highly detailed images of the worker bees, the comb surface, and the comb cell contents. The robots work cooperatively, supporting the operation of one another. Together, they form a module that can be inserted into a conventional beehive in place of a standard honeybee comb. We have developed software that can interpret and analyze the collected data and use the results of the analysis to estimate the recent evolution of the honeybee colony and forecast its future state. To ensure acceptance of the robots by the honeybees, we developed biocompatible materials for the robot coating and performed several insect-robot interaction experiments.
For the first time, cooperating robots were deployed in standardized Zender hives, enabling nondisruptive surveillance of the worker bees and the comb cell contents. By capturing images of the comb cell contents in high detail, the system will enable automated detection of bee pathology and diseases. Moreover, the robotic system can support the movement of an agent that can directly interact with the worker bees and cell contents inside a living honeybee colony. We developed the materials that, by coating the agent, will improve its acceptability by the bee colony. This will open the possibility of performing continuous long-term robot-insect interaction experiments in the near future.